Voice of the Whirlwind (25 page)

Weeks of haggling followed. Eventually the Alpha agreed to defect to Brighter Suns for the sum of 10,000 Starbright placed in the numbered account, a promotion to a high rank in the Pulsar Division, and transportation to Vesta. In return he’d bring large numbers of classified documents from his own department, from Wandis’s, plus his knowledge of the personalities and policies of most of Consolidated’s high-ranking security personnel. The Alpha also mentioned that when he had designed the security system to Sivi Source’s data banks, he’d also designed himself a way into it. Sivi was still the cutting edge in certain types of wetware, and Brighter Suns’ wetware people were anxious to get their hands on the information. Some of the Pulsar Division’s memoranda began to take on a gloating, congratulatory tone. Here was one in the eye for Group Seven.

The mechanics of the defection were arranged, and the Alpha transported to the Belt in a small cargo shuttle. An offer to move his wife with him was declined without fuss. Wandis would remain behind, marked for life as the wife of a defector.

A report from the agent who accompanied him indicated that his withdrawal from vee addiction caused him considerable discomfort on the journey, but that sedatives provided seemed to ease his trouble. Once the Alpha arrived, he was shown to lavish quarters in the Power Legation, his health and spirits revived, and he was debriefed, under drugs, by Brighter Suns specialists.

Debriefed under drugs. That, Steward realized, was why Colonel Angel had used the zap glove. The drugs hadn’t worked the first time, and Angel had gone for more direct methods.

The rest of the file was an attempt to explain and cover up the subsequent disaster. The Alpha, as a new high-ranking security officer assigned to the Legation, had requested an interview with the Head of the Power Legation, the Prime….

Did the Prime know? Was it the Prime’s idea?
Two of Angel’s questions, repeated over and over again.

…The Alpha got his meeting with the Prime, and there had released a spore that, a few hours later, caused the Prime to begin uncontrollably dispersing a hormone meant to warn the colony of an attack by outsiders. Others were infected as well, and when the hormone began to spread through the colony, the Powers grew uncontrollably agitated. The Prime and the others in the Legation headquarters, the center of the infection, attacked and killed one another. At this point, warning was given, and the human personnel were evacuated to their shelters. One-third of the Legation, over eight hundred Powers, were killed in the two days that it took for the outbreak to run its course. Before the outbreak grew chaotic, the Alpha visited de Prey in his office and shot him four times with a large-caliber silenced weapon. Resuscitation efforts failed. The Alpha then escaped Vesta by means unknown.

Damage to the Powers was limited by the fact that the Prime’s deputy, Prime-on-the-Right, had left for Power space just a few days before the outbreak and had escaped the catastrophe. Damage to de Prey was not confined, however. His insurance company, LifeLight, a former division of Coherent Light located on Earth, had failed to implant his memories in a clone. The mindthread recording was somehow defective. De Prey was going to stay dead.

Good work, Curzon, Steward thought. The Alpha couldn’t have arranged the de Prey clone’s failure. That had to be the work of Consolidated agents on Earth.

He smiled. His own insurance company had been another branch of Coherent Light, but if he’d ended up with LifeLight, he might have been going through revival at the same time as de Prey. What would de Prey have thought, Steward laughed, to see his assassin going through physical rehabilitation at the same station?

He paged through the rest of the file. There were long records of his interrogation by Angel, internal Brighter Suns correspondence questioning the evidence of his being a clone without appropriate memories, then proof positive from the hospital in Arizona that the files had not been updated. The final order had been countersigned by Angel in a smudged, angry hand. Steward grinned.

He flipped out of his file and into de Prey’s.
Vee tag.
N. Degrees in psychology and military science from St. Cyr, a school specializing in producing policorporate mercenaries. A picture of a young man with a lean face, cautious eyes, and a beret. Thesis:
Warrior Fanaticism: A Study in Combat without Morality.
The quality of the thesis work and a staff position during a short, highly successful Far Jewel campaign in Szechuan had caused Coherent Light to take an interest and to sponsor his defection from Far Jewel. That was among a series of Far Jewel defections that should have been taken as a warning sign of the failure of Far Jewel’s Earthside program, that the horror of Petit Galop was about to engulf Europe.

Pilot studies in de Prey’s indoctrination techniques, combined with combat experience in policorporate brawls on Earth triggered by Far Jewel’s collapse, proved the value of de Prey’s methods. De Prey was promoted to Lieutenant Colonel and given the authority to form two battalions of Icehawks. Another promotion came soon after, and so did four more battalions.

During the Artifact War, de Prey was high in the councils of Coherent Light. His policy was to convince the other warring policorps that CL was aiming at conquest of Sheol. Apparently the appalling escalation of the war was part of de Prey’s policy, and he intended much of Sheol to be destroyed or rendered uninhabitable in order to deny its effective use to whatever policorp finally conquered the place. When Coherent Light collapsed, de Prey defected to Seven Moons, along with information that allowed Seven Moons to absorb a lot of CL’s fragments.

Seven Moons was one of the policorps that helped set up Brighter Suns, and de Prey made a transfer to the Pulsar Division at that time. His work was in counterinsurgency, counterintelligence, and countersabotage, the reverse of what he’d done with the Icehawks, and some of the documents indicated he had some understanding with the Pulsar hierarchy to the effect that when Pulsar and the Renseignement General set up their own external affairs office in direct competition with Group Seven, de Prey would be able to resurrect the Icehawks as his, and Brighter Suns’, tool in the policorporate struggle.

Steward found that interesting. So far as he understood the charters of Brighter Suns and Consolidated Systems, they forbade the policorps to create a military that could act as anything other than a small, highly restricted internal police unit, and they were also forbidden to own territory outside of Vesta and Ricot. Somehow, Brighter Suns expected to alter its charter to the extent of creating a military force. How could they expect the other policorps to allow that? Was that the plan that the Alpha’s attack had been designed to forestall?

It occurred to Steward that the implications in this document might well be of vast interest to other policorps.

Steward looked at the picture of the vid screen, the totem he’d pasted above his bed. What was Curzon up to? he asked. What was Brighter Suns up to, that Consolidated had to stop it?

The de Prey file finished with yet another page on the LifeLight debacle, and Steward punched up the file on A. C. Curzon. She was a trade representative for a minor mining policorp in the Belt, and Steward flipped instead to Carlos Dancer Curzon, who turned out to be Brigadier-Director of the External Directorate of the Consolidated Police. Which meant, apparently, that he ran Consolidated’s spies.

The file was disappointingly thin. Curzon had been born into the trade, his father and mother both highly placed in Outward Ventures’ security apparatus. Both his parents had gone down with Outward Ventures and were presumed dead. At the collapse, Curzon had fled to Charter Station on a ship full of Earth-bound refugees, but he’d jumped ship on Charter and was known to have opened negotiations with several policorps for information he’d brought from Outward Ventures. He’d disappeared from Charter, and rumors were that Outward Ventures, which was growing savage in its search for defectors, had killed him to keep his stolen data a secret, but then three years later he’d turned up on Ricot as head of the External Directorate.

There were a few photographs in the file that showed a fleshy man with a square, high-browed face and thin brown hair. Curzon’s precise age was unknown, but he was believed to be in his forties. Sexual orientation and marital status were unknown. Ideological and religious beliefs were unknown. The names of his close associates and sponsors in the Consolidated hierarchy were unknown. Any genetic modification or wetware implants were unknown, but if they existed, they were not obvious. The budget for his organization was unknown.

Steward massaged his aching temples. He was gaining information, but none of it seemed relevant. The rest of his files had been chosen at random and probably constituted tens of thousands of pages of information, all of it having a high probability of being less relevant than what he had here.

He got out of Curzon’s file and constructed a search program that would wander through his data, logging the location of key words like “Curzon,” “Prime,” “Prime-on-the-Right.” He implemented it, then leaned back in his chair and watched it run.

The next few days were going to be long.

*

The next day Steward went into the commo room while Fischer was running his exercises in the gym and used the number three antenna to send a coded message to Griffith telling him that he hadn’t met Tsiolkovsky’s Demon on Vesta, but he’d come across some classified files on his own. He coded the first fifty files, keeping his own, and sent them out, making certain to erase any records of the transmission from Fischer’s instruments. It wasn’t hard—the radio was a simple commercial job, intended for ordinary use, and hadn’t been built with covert transmission in mind.

Steward had vetted all the files, and they’d furnished him with no more information than he already had. He told Griffith that on no account was he to sell them to Brighter Suns or Consolidated agents. He also pointed out that the file on de Prey might give Brighter Suns’ client/owners some knowledge of the mindset on Vesta and what Brighter Suns’ long-range intentions might be.

The next day Griffith sent a one-word reply:
Awesome.

Two days later Steward looked at his bank account. It had increased by 8,000 Starbright dollars.

He went through the files, looking for references to himself, de Prey, the Powers. He learned a great deal about the Byzantine nature of internal Brighter Suns politics and the various schemes by which outsiders tried, and usually failed, to make money off the Powers. Some of the files concerned known or suspected spies. Steward fired the files to Antarctica in batches of fifty or a hundred and watched his bank account grow.

By the time the last file was auctioned, his cut of the action amounted to 56,000 Starbright and change. He was rich, set up for life. There was no point in keeping this job unless he just wanted to travel; he could buy himself out of his contract with ease. He moved the money to a series of accounts all over the planet and invested a lot of it in safe blue-chip policorporate stock.

He was getting connected with things. Stock, money, whatever was implied by his deal with Griffith.

It was a strange feeling, somehow unreal. He’d never been wealthy before.

He went up to the docking cockpit and looked out through the armored bubble canopy at the universe of stars. They seemed closer now. He peered ahead, finding Earth and Luna gleaming white and gray against the diamond backdrop, each surrounded by its constellation of industrial stars, and he thought for a moment of New Humanity, where Natalie lived, and how close it was to Charter, a hundred dollars by intraorbital shuttle.

Memories moved through him, laughter, distant song, supple skin. A body in a long controlled tumble across a tunnel of empty air. A phantom taste that he couldn’t forget.

A question touched him as well as memory. He had knowledge now, knowledge bought with pain and cunning. It brought him closer to where he wanted to be. But he wondered if the knowledge implied action, if his coming closer to the Alpha also obliged him somehow, obliged him to finish the Alpha’s business.

There was a knock on the airlock door behind him. A piece of politeness in case he was doing something strange here, floating in the velvet darkness and performing the act of Onan or something. He reached out from his couch and pressed the intercom button. “Come in.”

It was Cairo, with a flask of pepper-flavored vodka. The door hissed shut behind her. She looked at him with her dark,
direct eyes. “Are you troubled in spirit, Steward?”

He grinned. “Can’t say I am.”

The diamonds on her cheekbones winked soft starlight. “Too bad,” she said. “I often find that when people are troubled in spirit, they come up here to look at the stars.” She webbed herself onto the other couch and looked up. “I was born up here, Earthman,” she said. She tilted her head back, sweeping her eyes over the silent, awesome starscape, the cold and steady points of light.

“What do you think of my home?” she asked.

Thoughts of Natalie trickled over his skin. This was her home now as well. “I think it’s got possibilities,” he said. “There are, however, problems of scale.”

She offered him the vodka, and he declined. “It’s a matter of perspective, Earthman,” Cairo said. “You have to get used to the big picture if you want to get ahead in this life.”

“D’accord.” Steward thought his perspective was just fine. There was a memory singing in his ears. It was a memory that, later, he would have to make up his mind about—he would have to indulge it or exorcise it somehow. But now, it seemed to be what he needed.

In the silent darkness, the memory sang on.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Images glowed in Steward’s mind. A bundle of cable brushed his cheek. He stuck it back in its clamp and it slid out again.

“Station power coupling engaged,” Cairo reported. “The board is green.”

“SHUT THE SHIP DOWN.” SuTopo’s voice came with overwhelming clarity over Steward’s interface disk, his tones broadcast straight to the audio nerves, very loud, almost an invasion of privacy. Steward winced. The cable touched him again.